Ivan Illich

[Energy and Equity (1974)]

The typical American male devotes more than 1,600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly instalments. He works to pay for petrol, tolls, insurance, taxes and tickets, He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it. 

And this figure does not take into account the time consumed by other activities dictated by transport: time spent in hospitals, traffic courts and garages; time spent watching automobile commercials or attending consumer education meetings to improve the quality of the next buy. 

The model American puts in 1,600 hours to get 7,500 miles: less than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only three to eight per cent of their society's time budget to traffic, instead of 28 per cent. 

What distinguishes the traffic in rich countries from the traffic in poor countries is not more mileage per hour of life-time for the majority, but more hours of compulsory consumption of high doses of energy, packaged and unequally distributed by the transportation industry.

[paragraph breaks added] 

Richard Rorty

From Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity

Once upon a time, we felt a need to worship something which lay beyond the visible world. Later we tried to substitute a love of truth for a love of God. Later, a love of ourselves. We should try to get to the point where we no longer worship anything.

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The point of social organization is to let everybody have a chance at self-creation to the best of his or her abilities. That goal requires peace, wealth, and freedom.

G. H. Hardy

[A] science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life.

Annie Dillard

From Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Nature is, above all, profligate. Don't believe them when they tell you how economical and thrifty nature is, whose leaves return to the soil. Wouldn't it be cheaper to leave them on the tree in the first place? This deciduous business alone is a radical scheme, the brainchild of a deranged manic-depressive with limitless capital. Extravagance? Nature will try anything once. This is what the sign of the insects says. No form is too gruesome, no behavior too grotesque. If you're dealing with organic compounds, then let them combine. If it works, if it quickens, set it clacking on the grass; there's always room for one more; you ain't so handsome yourself. This is a spendthrift economy; though nothing is lost, all is spent.

William Irwin Thompson

From Passages About Earth

American social science, so lavishly supported by the Ford Foundation, was simply ideological camoflage for the spread of a world view congenial to the growth of American-based multi-national corporations.

Ursula LeGuin

From No Time To Spare

Are you living your secret desires? ... I have none, my desires are flagrant.

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Capitalism thinks it's adaptable, but if it only has one stratagem, endless growth, the limit of its adaptability is irrevocably set. And we have reached that limit... [I]ncreasingly, all economic growth benefits only the rich.... Growth capitalism provides security for none but the strongest profiteers.

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I don't believe in Darwin's theory of evolution, I accept it. It isn't a matter of faith, but of evidence.... I wish we could stop using the word belief in matters of fact, leaving it where it belongs, in matters of religious faith and secular hope. I believe we'd avoid a lot of unnecessary pain if we did so.